The present invention generally relates to search techniques and more specifically to techniques for providing a configurable search process of business objects.
The ability to efficiently locate a business entity with minimal information is very valuable for a company. The entity may be a person, company, contact, or any other entity type (e.g., a consumer or a site). Typically, a search interface is provided that allows users to search databases of entities.
During a product lifecycle, many different departments for a company may need to search for entities. For example, a product lifecycle may include an offer stage, sale stage, and support stage. During each of these stages, different departments of the company may have different search needs. For example, each department may need to search different entities and may desire different search pages. Also, different departments would like search results formatted differently. For example, the search results should be organized in a logical manner for each department that is easily and quickly scanned by a user.
Customization of search engines, however, is very inflexible for an end user. Typically, a programmer needs to hard code changes in a search engine in order to customize the engine for different departments. This is inconvenient and time-consuming for both the developer of the search engine and the end users. Also, because coding changes need to be performed, the customization often does not happen. Thus, end users are left with a search engine that is not tailored to their needs.
Accordingly, a search framework that is configurable and flexible is desirable.